Trip to a Future Workplace in Q agency: Flutter Workshop

Last week we had a great time talking to students during the event called Trip to a future workplace in Q agency. 🙂

A trip to a future workplace was an educational visit that gave students the opportunity to get to know the Q and develop new skills in a few hours.

It was organized by eSTUDENT, which is the largest student association in Croatia. Every year they organize projects whose organization alone engages 200 members. Their goal? Providing additional experiences through project work and raising the quality of education.

We knew right away that we wanted to jump into a project like this, so this year we held a virtual trip intended for students with technical backgrounds who want to learn something new and can imagine their future careers in Q agency (especially if they have an interest in our Mobile team and Flutter).

What is Flutter and why did we choose it?

Flutter is Google’s Cross-platform. Google’s UI toolkit for building mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase. It is free and open-source, which is probably one reason it gains popularity with clients and developers. Flutter is a very young and modern SDK based on the Dart language.

We got together for a Zoom meeting last week and started our agenda to learn more about it. First, there was an introduction, and then, the real deal – tech talk. 🙂

Introduction to Q:

HR department (Sara Madjer and myself) covered the introduction to Q and we talked a bit about who we are as a company, what we do, and what are our core values aka the words we live by. Of course, we also mentioned our current openings for Junior Developers in Q, so the students learned exactly what they needed to do for us to get their CVs and for them to gain our attention. 🙂

Next on the agenda, Adrian Keindl, our Head of Business Development, stepped up and talked about interesting projects we worked on from a Business perspective. In a fun way and with a lot of examples, students learned what it was like to collaborate on projects with prestigious companies such as The Times, BBC, Hilti, Vaillant, Facebook, and others.

Finally, the star of our trip was our Mobile Team Lead Zlatko Matokanovic, who held an educational Flutter workshop for interested students.

Flutter talk

Lately, there is much talk around Flutter, new technology, and successfully breaking into the market. As a company with one of the larger teams using Flutter in Croatia, it was a logical choice to introduce students to the secrets of the craft.

That is why Zlatko talked about the evolution of Flutter; started with Basics of Mobile Development, continued with the dierences between Android & iOS, and in the main part, he talked about the reasons why we turned to Flutter, what are the challenges of its use and what are its advantages.

Of course, all this talk raised dierent questions, and that is why we saved Q&A (best) for last.

Q&A session

The questions were, of course, related to Flutter, but we wanted to give students a look into other Q departments as well. That is why Ante (Backend Team Lead) and Dominik (JavaScript developer) joined Sara, Adrian, Zlatko, and me. Ante told us about his leadership experience in Q agency (and World of Warcraft), while Dominik told us what it was like to work on exciting projects in our JavaScript department.

You can probably already guess the direction in which the Q&A session went. Students asked: “How to gain an advantage when looking for a job? What is the best way to learn and gain skills? What do Junior Developers do in Q, and what is expected of them? (To bring us coee, of course – NOT). What are the most interesting projects our developers have worked on?”

If you think about it, underlying these questions runs the thought about the steps they needed to take to work in similar positions as our developers in the future. We hope that through a pleasant and relaxed trip to Q, we have managed to share valuable tips & tricks that will help them achieve their professional goals in the future (maybe even in Q :)).

Some of us at Q are former members of eSTUDENT, which helped us find our place in the business world. We hope our trip oered some insight and could do the same for the students who visited us last week.

We look forward to repeating such an event!